And still it expands !

Imagine my surprise after a further 10 days when I found that the super had all its foundation drawn out and that much honey was to be found some sealed already. My plans for  the year were certainly changed when a week later I needed to put a second super on as the first was full of sealed stores.  I had not expected to even contemplate taking any honey from them this first year and we still had several weeks to go.

Still not spotting the marked queen I conducted an inspection with my son and my eagle eyed apprentice spotted a chewed open queen cell so we kept looking. Spookily enough we found a virile young queen busy laying in the outer frames.  The brood pattern looked extremely good and all very healthy so we surmised that supercedure had taken place.  Trapping her with a brand new queen cage I demanded the brand new marking pen – so much for my plans to practice on a drone and then deal with the queen! Could I get the pen to work? Absolutely not. Chortling adolescents do not help the matter; he only stopped when he realised he had a bee crawling up his leg .. Who’s laughing now! Ha.

Accepting defeat I removed the cage and was delighted to see her scuttle away.  I had been quite  worried about my careless approach and the length of time she had been “impaled”.  Shutting up the hive I took the pen home and found it working – clearly the ink had worked its way through the system - Great!

So where does this leave us? I have two supers on, one full of sealed stores and one at 50% although not much is capped so we have arranged to borrow an extractor for this forthcoming weekend, bought all we need and will be removing much honey from the frames so I am expecting much stickiness and mirth overall. More to follow.